Being homeschooled and raised with three brothers had its problems, but Maggie's life is about to get a lot more complicated as she faces her greatest trial yet - entering public school for the first time!

A First Second Book
available in stores now!

Sponsors

Link to Friends With Boys!

About Friends With Boys

Friends With Boys is a 211 page graphic novel that will be published by First Second Books on February 24th, 2012. How it came to be that is hopefully a (slightly) interesting story!

My name is Faith, and I started drawing comics and putting them on the internet way back in 1999. At first I did comics because I enjoyed writing stories, and I wanted drawings to go with the stories. The fact that I wasn’t terribly good at drawing wasn’t a deterrent. After all, I was just doing comics “for fun.” That was about 12 years ago, and over those 12 years, I drew about 1600 pages of comics. The comics I’ve written and drawn are: Demonology 101 (my first online comic and how I learned to draw!), Ice, Zombies Calling, The War at Ellsmere, Brain Camp (art only) and my current online comic, The Adventures of Superhero Girl.

Friends With Boys started out as a pitch for DC Comic’s now defunct Minx imprint. Minx was all about comics for girls, and as a girl who drew comics, I was very happy when I was asked to pitch for it. Sadly it wasn’t meant to be, and the imprint was cancelled before I had the chance to be a part of it. But it worked out in the end as my wonderful publisher First Second gave Friends With Boys a home.

Friends With Boys is the first comic I’ve written and drawn where I used my own life as a jumping off point. The comic is not autobiographical. Nothing in it happened to me, but there are certain similarities that were intentional: I have three brothers (although I am the oldest, not the youngest). I was home-schooled until high school. My parents for a time separated. I’ve put the feelings I had about those experiences into this comic, so it is probably the closest thing to autobiography I will ever do, even if I have never had punk friends in high school. I have also never seen a ghost.

Friends With Boys was written and drawn from the end of 2009 until August 2010 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Those familiar with Halifax will recognize certain familiar landmarks in the panel backgrounds. The comic is not set in Halifax due to logistics (I needed it to be set in a small town), but I decided to use Halifax as a model for the town Friends With Boys is set in.

I hope you enjoy this comic, and I really hope that you’ll tell your friends it’s available online. My roots are in online comics, in the constant discussion that arises from putting your work online, and I’m incredibly happy that First Second is allowing me to do this. So please, spread the word, drop a comment in the comment section, or shoot me an email! I hope to hear from you. :)

Hello readers, new ones just discovering the comic and those who’ve been with it since the beginning. Friends With Boys is now complete online. You may read it in its entirety, all 200+ pages, for free, for the next eight days. Then the image files of the comic (except for a short preview) will be taken down. While the comic was being serialized online, I blogged a lot about my comic making process. I did write ups about how I make comics, what my opinions on what makes a good comic are, and pointed out various Easter eggs throughout Friends With Boys. That stuff will all remain up, so if you buy a hard copy of Friends With Boys, you can still read along with my thought process.

And now (today!), Friends With Boys is a published book! Yay! I hope that if you’ve read the web version and liked it, and want to support me as a creator, you’ll consider buying the book.

I’ve really enjoyed serializing Friends With Boys online. If you’re new to my work, I started out making comics online before moving into print. I posted the very first page of my very first online comic on my very first website back in August, 1999, and wow, was that page ugly. Here it is! Notice a weird similarity to the first page of Friends With Boys? Yeah, that was not deliberate, I promise. But look how much your drawing skills can improve if you draw thousands of pages of comics over a ten year period! Anyway, I’m really thrilled my wonderful publisher First Second Books has allowed me to return to my roots and put Friends With Boys online as a lead up to its publication. As a reader and purchaser of comics, I have bought quite a few hard copy versions of online comics, because I enjoy the reading experience of having the whole thing collected, and I want to support the author. I hope you will too. :)

Otherwise, there are a few upcoming events I hope to see some readers at:
Book signing! At my local comics shop Strange Adventures, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, March 3rd (Saturday), 2-4pm (EDITING TO ADD: The book launch has been moved to the following Saturday due to the books not shipping to Strange Adventures on time. The launch will now be March 10th from 2-4pm. Go here for info).
Comic convention! I’ll have a table at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, May 6th-7th. There are a few other conventions I am trying to attend, but everything else is up in the air at the moment. For updates, please follow my twitter or join my Facebook fan page. I’m pretty good about updating those two spots.